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The OverAchiever: The curious case of the Grey Riding Camel
Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, we begin an epic search for transportation across the Uldum sands. The developers' strangest and most eccentric additions to the game often wind up numbering among the things that make World of Warcraft truly great, and -- fortunately for this column -- many of them are achievements as well. Today, I'd like to talk about something that, strictly speaking, is not yet an achievement. As of the most recent PTR build (13750), we know that it's going to be one in patch 4.1, and I am highly delighted that the Grey Riding Camel is now fair game for OverAchiever. If you've followed Cataclysm zone or reputation news at all since the beta hit, you've probably known about the two camel mounts available at exalted with the Ramkahen faction. Getting them is a pretty straightforward process: Quest in Uldum, meet the kitty people, buy the kitty tabard, get the kitty people to fall in love with you -- and sooner or later, a Brown or Tan Riding Camel will result. Actually, that makes the process sound a lot more salacious than it really is, but I digress. The Grey Riding Camel has always been different, and in order you get one, you'll engage in a little quest worthy of the zone's Indiana Jones feel. As with all Indiana Jones stories, it all starts when you find a valuable artifact after an agonizing search ...
Robot camel jockeys found packing illegal stun guns, Dubai police say 'Don't tase them bro!'
It's been awhile since we've talked about the remote controlled robot jockeys used in Arabian camel racing, but a recent scandal that has rocked the camel-racing world compels us to revisit the topic. The Dubai police discovered that some shady characters have been selling robot jockeys equipped with stun guns to "encourage" camels to run faster. We're pretty sure that the animals don't need any more incentive to run -- they already have a robot whipping them -- and it's good to see that the powers-that-be agree with us, as the two men selling the machines were arrested. Now that our dromedary friends need no longer fear being tased in the name of sport, we only have to worry about over-zealous peace officers using them on all of us. [Image Credit: ZDNet]
Northrop Grumman's CaMEL 'bot features one .50 caliber gun, loads of class
When the dream factory that is Northrop Grumman needed to up the "wow factor" at its Association of the U.S. Army's Washington conference booth, it did what plenty of CES exhibitors wished they could do: it weaponized. Hence, the deadliest CaMEL yet. The acronym stands for Carry-all Mechanized Equipment Landrover -- think of the BigDog robot, but with treads instead of legs. The motorized platform will hump up to 1,200 pounds of gear at seven miles per hour, and as Spencer Ackerman at Wired points out, over sixty of them have been sold to the Israeli military. But the above pictured CaMEL is the only one floating around with armaments: in this case, a .50-caliber M2 machine gun. The gun is fired remotely, via touchscreen controls, and the platform itself could support any number of weapons including the M249, the MK19 grenade launcher, or 30mm cannon. Which kind of proves a pet theory of ours: if you build it, eventually someone will mount a gun on it.
